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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal returns to Iowa on Tuesday to meet with local pastors and again look for support among Christian evangelicals for a possible White House campaign.

The stated reason for Jindal's trip is to talk about his headlining appearance later this month at a prayer rally that is expected to draw thousands of people to Baton Rouge, and to discuss ways to mount a similar event in Iowa.

"These are a group of Christian men and women very interested in spiritual revival, very interested in prayer," Jindal said in a Monday interview with The Associated Press.

But the private meetings with Christian religious leaders in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines also come as Jindal courts religious conservatives across the country ahead of the 2016 campaign.

Tuesday's trip to first-to-vote Iowa will be his fifth since June. In recent months, Jindal has also spoken to pastors in New Hampshire, at a gathering of faith leaders and conservative activists in Washington, and in Oklahoma at an event promoting a Bible museum planned by owners of Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby.

In 10 days, the Iowa GOP will elect a new party Chairman. And Danny Carroll, the man that they’re likely to choose to supervise the 2016 Republican caucuses is an ardent social conservative who gave up pumpkin farming to devote himself full-time to the fight to save heterosexual marriage in the Hawkeye State.

The Democratic Party’s wins in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, and its modest successes in recent Congressional elections, have obscured a series of setbacks for the party in the states. As National Journal put it, the GOP “wiped the floor with Democrats” in the 2010 midterm elections, setting a record in the modern era by picking up 680 seats in state legislatures. The next-largest harvest of legislative seats was the Democrats’ 628-seat gain in the Watergate-dominated election of 1974. The 2010 landslide gave the GOP the upper hand in the subsequent Congressional redistricting process, allowing Republicans to tilt the playing field in their favor and shape U.S. elections for years to come. In the meantime, conservatives have used friendly, GOP-dominated state legislatures to ram their agenda through legislatures—in “red” states and even some states that lean “blue”—on a range of issues: imposing harsh voter restrictions in North Carolina, for example, and passing dramatic anti-labor legislation in Michigan.

The roots of this debacle go far deeper than one or two election cycles and cannot be explained by the normal ebb and flow in electoral fortunes of the two major parties. The seeds were actually sown in the late 1980s, when strategists in the conservative movement came to an important realization.

AU's ever-vigilant Right Wing Watch has spotted the return of United In Purpose:

United In Purpose announced its return with an email alerting activists that it is organizing a "Voter Mobilization Strategy Summit" to take place in Dallas in March that will feature the likes of Jim Garlow, Rick Scarborough, David Barton, and Glenn Beck

Iowa will be a tough, if necessary, state for Rand Paul. Interestingly, it was also the contest where his father turned in one of his best performances among evangelicals in 2012. At 18 percent of the vote, Ron Paul finished a distant second with this socially conservative bloc behind Santorum—and ahead of Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Michele Bachmann.

In theory, if the younger Paul held onto his father’s base and added some Santorum, Perry, Gingrich, and Bachmann votes, he would be quite a formidable contender for the Republican presidential nomination. If he can get social conservatives to add the plight of prisoners and a more prudent approach to American power to their grave concerns about the sanctity of innocent human life, he can do something even more important.

Either way, a partnership between the Christian right and liberty movement could change the Republican Party. And, God willing, the country.

Over the last few years the religious right, rumored to be in decline, has receded from American secular consciousness. But amidst the current government shutdown, some of the more astute political analysts on the left, such BillMoyers.com producer Joshua Holland and the The Nation'sLee Fang are beginning to point out that, respectively, 1) today's Republican Party has, by objective measures, become truly radicalized and, 2) the main force behind the current government shutdown is the religious (and largely Christian) right.

Below is Bruce Wilson's video of Sentors Ted Cruz and Rand Paul being blessed, by conservative evangelical clergy, with protection against opposition. The blessing didn't seem focused on the senators doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their god.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas presided over a pep rally, telling the crowd at the Values Voter Summit that President Barack Obama fears them and that conservative believers can turn back the tide of liberalism. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky expounded at length about the threat to Christianity and the West from radical Islam. And Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida pledged fealty to Jesus Christ and the American dream, while making sure never to mention immigration reform.

Jonathan Martin on The New York Times' Caucus blog reports that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) met this week with religious right leaders. An excerpt:

A group of longtime Christian conservative activists are holding a private meeting Thursday in Washington to hear informal presentations from two of the most talked-about potential Republican presidential candidates: Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

“This is not a fundraiser, nor an endorsement of U.S. Senator Rand Paul or U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, just a great opportunity for you to get to know them and discuss your ideas and views with them and hear of their lives, faith, and respective vision for our nation,” wrote Robert Fischer, a South Dakota-based conservative organizer, in an emailed invitation to dozens of evangelical Christian leaders.

The gathering is being held in conjunction with the Family Research Council’s Values Voters conference, an annual gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington, but it is not an official part of that event. Rather, it is being staged by a loosely-organized group of Republican leaders that call themselves “Conservatives of Faith.”

The hosts include Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, the former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, the conservative talk show host Janet Parshall and Richard Viguerie, the direct mail pioneer, along with a handful of others from the conservative movement. Mr. Fischer is the group’s chief organizer.

The Obama administration recently filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that it is constitutional to conduct explicitly Christian and official prayers at town council meetings.

In a remarkable book titled “The God Strategy,” David Domke and Kevin Coe describe how the infusion of religion into politics surged since the Reagan presidency. While prior presidents regularly made references to God, Reagan made them almost systematically. For instance, Lyndon Johnson invoked God in 61 percent of his national addresses, compared to 26 percent for Richard Nixon and 25 percent for Jimmy Carter. But Reagan did so 96 percent of the time. His successors carried on: Bush I (91 percent), Clinton (93 percent), and Bush II (95 percent). (The study was completed before Obama’s presidency.) Reagan was the first president to start emphasizing “God bless America,” an expression that all his successors adopted. This chauvinistic slogan had only been used once, by Nixon, in a national presidential speech before Reagan.

Obama has also resorted to the God strategy, such as by mentioning God five times in his first inauguration speech. “God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny,” he proclaimed. “Let it be said [that] with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.” The inescapable suggestion was that God supported Obama’s inauguration.

It's baffling and regretful that the recent attention online about the Religious Left has insufficiently mentioned the prescient Dispatches from the Religious Left written four years ago and now more relevant than any time since its publication.

There is currently a lot of noise in the media about how a Religious Left is rising. But there is also little evidence that such a movement is being organized. A few years ago, a faux Religious Left was manufactured Inside the Beltway. The product didn't sell well, and here we are. But some people who thought that an authentic Religious Left might be a good idea got together and published a book of essays about what it might be like and how to get there.